What Are the Types of Catalysis Recognized by the Nobel Committee?
The Nobel Prize has acknowledged various forms of catalysis, including:
- Homogeneous Catalysis: Catalysts and reactants are in the same phase, usually liquid. An example is Wilkinson's catalyst, which was central to Geoffrey Wilkinson's Nobel Prize in 1973.
- Heterogeneous Catalysis: Catalysts are in a different phase than the reactants, typically solid catalysts interacting with gaseous or liquid reactants. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch were awarded the Nobel Prize for the Haber-Bosch process, fundamentally a heterogeneous catalytic process.
- Enzyme Catalysis: Catalysts are biological molecules, often proteins. The work of John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019, exemplifies the importance of catalytic processes in biochemical applications.
